Software development organizations constantly strive to reduce the time to market for their software products. In order to achieve this objective, there is a need to closely monitor the quality of the software being developed to ensure that the product meets its intended design requirements. Software product quality is also the primary concern of Managers & Product Owners during development. Traditionally, a primary indicator used to indicate the quality of a software product during development of the product is the number of open issues related to the product. The terms “open issues” or “error messages” will be used herein to encompass all types of error messages and other types of indications that a feature related to a software product does not meet the design specifications of the software product.
A method of determining and reporting software product quality based primarily on the number of open issues is however insufficient since it may not accurately reflect the quality of the product being developed. For example, a relative high number of error messages does not necessarily imply poor or bad quality. In some instances each of the open issues (messages) could be fairly isolated, simple to solve, or may correspond to less critical scenarios associated with the product, thereby not truly representing a major impact to the quality of the software product. Likewise, a relatively low number of error messages does not necessarily imply high or good quality. In some aspects, each of the open issues may correspond to very complex scenarios or be highly coupled and difficult to solve. As such, the relatively few open issues may truly represent a low quality for the software product.